Legal Experts See Little Effect on News Media From Hulk Hogan Verdict

Legal scholars were as startled as anyone by the scale of the damages awarded by a Florida jury on Friday to the retired professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan in his suit against Gawker.com for posting a sex tape.

But several experts on the First Amendment said on Saturday that the $115 million award was very likely to be reduced and that even if the verdict against Gawker survived scrutiny in higher courts, any wider effect on press freedoms was likely to be limited.

The celebrity former wrestler and reality television star, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after the website posted in 2012 a black-and-white tape made in 2007 that showed Mr. Bollea having sex with the wife of a friend of his at the time, Todd Clem, a radio shock jock who had legally changed his name to Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Mr. Bollea said the videotape was made and distributed without his permission.

The jury’s award of damages was greater than Mr. Bollea asked for, an indication of how strongly the six jurors condemned Gawker for posting the intimate scenes. The court could still add punitive damages.

In the end, either the trial judge or an appeals court can reduce the damages. But the case will be watched intently by legal experts because it touches on hazily defined boundaries of constitutional law in the Internet era: What is newsworthy? Where is the line between privacy and freedom of the press?

Whether this case has any direct implications for press freedoms depends on what happens next. A jury decision in one lower court does not set a precedent.

Because it came from a trial court, Friday’s verdict “doesn’t in itself move the bar on the constitutional question in any significant way,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Lawyers for Gawker Media say they have strong grounds for an appeal. Before that happens, though, the company faces a series of legal hurdles as the trial comes to a close. Once the jury sets punitive damages, a process that will probably begin in the coming week, the judge in the case must set a bond that the company will have to post.

In Florida, such bonds are capped at $50 million, a figure that would require the company to raise significant money. Gawker plans to appeal if the bond is set high, or try to have the bond stayed entirely while it appeals.

In its appeal, Gawker plans to argue that a federal court and the state appeals court have already ruled that what it published was newsworthy, and thus that the case should never have gone before a jury. Gawker is also set to argue that, in any case, the jurors were not allowed to hear material evidence, some of which was unsealed on Friday.

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Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media. Lawyers for Gawker say they have strong grounds for an appeal.CreditAkos Stiller for The New York Times

An appeals court generally does not question a jury’s assessment of the facts. But if the court were to overturn the verdict, it would point to legal errors in the trial judge’s instructions or rulings. Appeals courts tend to give more weight to First Amendment protections than trial courts do, experts said.

But even if the decision against Gawker is upheld, several legal experts say, its effect on wider press freedoms is very likely to be limited.

“I think the damages are crazy, but I just don’t see this as a terrible blow to the First Amendment,” said George Freeman, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, a trade association of law firms and media companies, including Gawker Media. Mr. Freeman is a former assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company.

“This was an unusual and extremely private matter,” Mr. Freeman said. If Friday’s decision stands, he said, “that could be bad for the future of sex tapes, but I’m not sure it would be a threat to anything else.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, an expert on the First Amendment and the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, also said that any consequences for privacy law would be narrow.

“I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent,” he said. “I don’t think it goes any further than that and I do not see a First Amendment basis for claiming that there is a right to do this.”

The Gawker case is an outlier because few media outlets would consider publishing a graphic sex tape in the absence of a strong public purpose, said Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, an expert in the First Amendment at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.

Still, the Gawker verdict could have more subtle effects, even on traditional newspapers and broadcasters, she said, as they consider whether to publish intimate personal details that are linked to bigger news stories. While mainstream media organizations already make such judgments, she said, the verdict against Gawker may provide a potent reminder of the stakes.

For a long time, Ms. Lidsky said, the balance in the nation’s courts was tilted heavily in favor of the freedom of the press.

“Could this verdict signal a slight tilting back toward privacy?” she asked. “There are those who say that if privacy means anything, it means a sex tape, aired on the Internet for millions to gawk at.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Legal Experts See Little Effect on News Media From Hulk Hogan Verdict . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe